10 December 2019, EXPRESS Seminar, Melissa Fusco

I explore the implications of the Tense Phrase deletion operation known as sluicing (Ross 1969) for the semantic and pragmatic literature on the Free Choice effect (Kamp, 1973; von Wright, 1969). I argue that the time-honored ‘I don’t know which’-riders on Free Choice sentences, traditionally taken to show that the effect is pragmatic, are sensitive to scope. Careful attention to such riders suggests that these sluices do not show cancellation on Free Choice antecedents in which disjunction scopes narrower than the modal.